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bushfire

Our suffering native animals need YOUR HELP during the bushfires. Please help urgently. Addresses and contacts inside. Please send in other contact addresses to add to this list and let us have articles and comments about your experiences helping wildlife in these terrible fires.

The distribution of these fires that are mostly unnoticed by the human inhabitants of Australia tells us something about this land of ours, which is reinforced by the map. Firstly, it gets very very hot and dry away from the sea and the only major mountain chain (which is on the East coast of Australia). Secondly, the desert vegetation is burning. (This is happening more and more often and some of the vegetation may not return due to this.) Thirdly, almost nobody notices because humans cannot easily survive in those regions. If you scroll down to the satellite and desert maps below the NASA image, you will realise why having more and more people come to Australia is a bad idea. We are using up a very thin fringe of green; it is getting hotter, and the desert is expanding into the inhabited areas, preceded by high temperatures and fire.

Helga Vierich writes that Fire has long played a part in the ecology of the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa. Among the Kua of the south-central Kalahari the power of natural and man-made fires is well understood. These hunter-gatherers use fire to control ticks, increase plant fruit yields, alter the species composition of wild plant communities, influence the movement of game, and to attract specific animals into snares and traps.